Ron Gilbert Ponders Monkey Island's Future Form

"I am not making another Monkey Island," says Gilbert. "I have no plans to make another Monkey Island." But ...

"It would be a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2," says Ron Gilbert, maker of The Cave and, of course, the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, wannabe pirate extraordinaire. Not that he's planning on making a sequel to his cult hit series Monkey Island. He makes that very clear, and in any event he no longer holds the rights. Owning the IP, incidentally, is item number 14 on his long list of things he would do if he ever got to make another Monkey Island - or as he would rather call it, Monkey Island 3a - but, for now, all Gilbert has is a 17-point wish list.

He'd rebuild SCUMM. "I'd build an engine and a language where funny ideas can be laughed about at lunch and be a game in the afternoon," Gilbert says. "SCUMM did that." He only wants a small team, of 10 or less, crafting a game with pure monkey love. Full voiced monkey love, for that matter, with enhanced low-res graphics, just enough to make it look good without getting bogged down in 3D. Even so, it wouldn't be the Monkey Island 3 he was going to make in 1992. "I could never make that game now," says Gilbert. "It is lost to time."

Dialogue puzzles and hardcore adventure game trickery, with a full-on inventory; these are a few of Gilbert's favorite things, but he acknowledges that this sort of gaming is more for the enthusiast than the mass market. Verbs shall be forbidden in the new utopia, and also game journalists, which may mean that journalists are secretly verbs in disguise. "The press won't get advanced copies," says Gilbert, "I feel they should play it at the same time you do."

"I hope they won't be mad at me," he adds. "My Metacritic score hopes they won't be mad at me."

But most important of all is point 17: it will be the game that Gilbert wants to make. He doesn't want the pressure of trying to make something for the fans; he'd rather just vanish into his own creation for a while, and let things take shape as they will. Not that any of this is going to happen - his first two points make that very clear - but if it did, he promises we'd love the game that would result.